30 Responses to Linkage

Not sure what to make of that political quiz. I’m a “Centrist Anti-Government Total-Isolationist Nativist Fundamentalist.”

I notice that you like to read Fred DeBoer — I never could figure out the appeal. I know he likes to criticize his fellow-travelers, but that’s only because he wants them to be holier than thou. Every time I try to take him seriously, he turns out to be a slightly smarter, social justice warrior (yeah feminism, abortion, gay rights and welfare!) who really believes capitalism is evil (or something). He also thinks Israel is bad. In other words, he’s mostly tedious.

That’s actually only the second DeBoer piece I’ve read. I put it up here b/c when I posted it on Facebook a number of people disagreed with his take, so I thought there was the possibility of generating discussion. I thought the previous one I linked to, on how progressives are abandoning due process, was pretty good, tho.

I got ‘Right-Leaning Libertarian Total-Isolationist Nationalist Reactionary’, which is perhaps four fifths correct, I suppose (I’d call myself somewhere between paleoconservative and paleolibertarian, but the quiz is a too short for more nuance, of course).

Still, mostly accurate for me. Political quizzes are always fun, in any case, though often times, they tell more about the designers’ biases than the participants actual worldviews. I was pleasantly surprised how close they were, in this case.

I regularly come across young liberals/progressives/SJWs for whom any art that does not further their political-social project is bad. Sarkeesian is the current standard bearer of that attitude. I can’t tell these people to fuck off loudly enough.

You could google “GamerGate” and fall down an Internet rabbit hole spending hours catching up with the story, personalities, and controversy (of which Sarkeesian is a major component) but I do not recommend doing so.

At the Wes Anderson theme park you can’t actually ever get anywhere, because you have to constantly be right in the center of everything.

As for that Fred DeBoer guy, I’m immediately suspicious of anyone that won’t allow comments on a blog. He simply isn’t interested in engaging at any level. This comment of his is subsequently hilarious:

“When we talk about social justice, we are referring to the effort to make the world a more moral, righteous, equitable, and compassionate place, and not to the effort for any of us to be or appear individually moral.”

Uhh huh. Since his entire blog is just one big status posture that won’t allow dissent, I sort of question his sincerity here. Though I give him props for this: “I do not believe that the current tactics that are common to the social justice left can possibly persuade enough of the people who need to be persuaded.”

He’s at least aware enough to realize that much. Though his “argument” with the Progressives are tactical, not strategic. They both ultimately want [insert absurd fantasy].

This is spot on: “Though his “argument” with the Progressives are tactical, not strategic. They both ultimately want [insert absurd fantasy].”

I also love that quote you pull from the post: ““When we talk about social justice, we are referring to the effort to make the world a more moral, righteous, equitable, and compassionate place, and not to the effort for any of us to be or appear individually moral.”

How the heck does one make the world a better place if you are unwilling to make an effort to be moral?!? Classic left-wing clap-trap — read Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals for lots of real world examples. From one of the Amazon reviewers:

“Karl Marx was bourgeois to the core and seems to have exploited the only working-class woman he ever knew: paying her starvation wages, impregnating her and forcing her to abandon their child. Johnson lacerates the behaviour of these prominent figures but more importantly shows how their shabby personal values foreshadow the social harm their works engendered.”

I’d like to see one of these political-economic quizzes that was *not* written by libertarian types. One that would troll them for a change.

1) Private firms should be allowed to sell expired meat on the free market, provided they openly declare its status to potential buyers (in fine print on page 47 of the online supplemental nutrition data form).

2) Sidewalks currently provided and maintained by the government should be replaced with pressure-sensitive tracks owned by private firms, and pedestrians charged by metering their each and every footstep (steps they take with freely worn ID ankle bracelets).

3) It is annoying when my neighbors pressure me into donating food dishes to a block party, since the unequal exchange usually involves me not liking or eating the food that they make.

4) It’s nobody else’s business what transpires during consensual, mutually pleasurable man-puppy relations in the bedroom.

5) My father can simply pay me to stop blasting Rush music: if I should have to give up the joy of sticking it to my mouth-breathing family, he should have to give something up too.

6) Contracts make familial and romantic relationships much less ambiguous and less invadable by the defecting strategy.